the eric update – day 26: beating the wrap. more bloody goo. and personalized snugglies.

today, eric took one of those teeny, little micropreemie steps that gets him one step closer to being released. he finally beat the wrap! literally. in other words they don’t have to cover his bed in plastic wrap to help keep his body temperature stable. it’s a big deal for a micropreem to be able to maintain his or her own temperature ( in fact it’s one of the release criteria ) and while he can’t do it all on his own, he’s making great progress.

he’s threw more “a’s” ( apneas or stopping breathing ) and “b’s” ( bradycardia or stopping breathing ) today than usual, almost all of them due to mucus and goo collecting in his nasal passages and throat. the nurses joke that eric is “slimy”. it’s not super unusual, but the downside is that they can only get the gunk out by thrusting a tube into his nose and suctioning it out. as i’ve noted before, he doesn’t like it at all and the downside is that you can imagine that the suction tube irritates his passages and he’s getting a bit more blood in the stuff they are suctioning out. it’s one of those things that’s “normal”, but that gets harder and harder to watch day in and day out. and bloody nasal passages seem like nice little areas for infections to grow, so kris and i spend a lot of time just wishing he’d be a little less slimy.

in addition to postcards, eric is receiving surprise gifts! a friend of a friend of a friend who had twins that graduated from the other nicu in town sent us custom bedding! they were hand made by a nicu doctor and they kept her twins bundled; if you look down in the lower left corner you can see that she even stiched “snowdeal” on the bedding so it doesn’t get lost in the laundry.

dang. that’s some serious kindness from a stranger.

the bedding is reversed so i could get the stitched name in the shot with him. you might notice the cloth straps which are used to really give him a bundled feeling. micropreems get distressed at the sudden lack of boundaries and really like feeling things pressing around them which they lost when they were suddenly taken out of the womb.

jeanne, thank you.

a family member bought eric a little angel with his name on it a day or two into his stay at the nicu. for some reason, it kept falling off the stand on his radiant warming bed which would lead to endless “fallen angel” and “the angel fell down on the job” jokes from the staff. somebody came up with the idea of putting it in a plastic bag and hanging it over the edge of a stand on the bed.

conflux - a curated confluence of curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex

“There is no doubt that retail is making a big bet on health care. If it succeeds, the payoff will be enormous. But just as Uber is at war with the taxi industry, retailers will soon be at war with the large, publicly-traded health care chains.”venture beat

wow.“Beginning with this weekend’s NHL All-Star Skills Competition and All-Star Game, the NHL will use GoPro cameras to deliver viewers never-before-seen perspectives of the game.” odin and i would watch this all. day. long. A++

“Our current cultural obsession with food is undeniable. But, while the advent of the foodie may be a 21st century phenomenon, from an evolutionary standpoint, flavor has long helped define who we are as a species, a new book argues.”npr

“Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.”the new yorker